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2015 Contest Judges

The deadline for submissions to the 2015 prizes has passed.

We will announce the winners and respond to all submitting authors in November.

Learn more about our judges:

FICTION

Chang-rae Lee is the author of the novels Native Speaker, A Gesture Life, Aloft, and The Surrendered. Native Speaker was awarded the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, the Barnes & Noble Discover Award, and an ALA Notable Book of the Year Award. A Gesture Life won the Anisfield-Wolf Literary Award, the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, and the NAIBA Book Award for Fiction, and was cited as a Notable Book of Year by the New York Times, Esquire, Publishers Weekly, and the Los Angeles Times. Aloft was a New York Times Bestseller and Notable Book. The Surrendered won the 2011 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and was a nominated finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Lee's newest book, On Such a Full Sea, is forthcoming in January 2014 from Riverhead Books. He has also written stories and articles for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Food & Wine, Granta, and many other publications.

Born in Seoul, Korea, Mr. Lee was educated at Phillips Exeter, Yale, and the University of Oregon. He is a professor in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, where he teaches creative writing.

NONFICTION

Anne Fadiman is an author, essayist, editor, and teacher. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, her account of the crosscultural conflicts between a Hmong family and the American medical system, won a National Book Critics Circle Award. Her best-selling essay collection Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader is a book entirely about books — from purchasing them, to reading them, to handling them. Fadiman’s most recent collection is At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays, in which she discloses her passions for (among other things) staying up late, reading Coleridge, drinking coffee, and ingesting large quantities of ice cream. Her essays and articles have appeared in Harper's, The New Yorker, and The New York Times, among many other publications, and she has won National Magazine Awards for both reporting and essays. Fadiman has also edited a literary quarterly, The American Scholar, and two essay anthologies. She is currently working on a book titled The Oenophile's Daughter due in Spring 2015.

As the inaugural Francis Writer in Residence, Yale University’s first endowed appointment in nonfiction writing, Anne Fadiman serves as both a professor in the English department and a mentor to students considering careers in writing or editing.

POETRY

Major Jackson is the author of three collections of poetry: Holding Company, Hoops, andLeaving Saturn, which was awarded the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. He is the editor of Library of America's Countee Cullen: Collected Poems and his work has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, and many other periodicals. Major Jackson has received awards including a Whiting Writers' Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and an honors from Witter Bynner. He was an arts fellow at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Jackson is a core faculty member at the Bennington Writing Seminars and is the Richard A. Dennis Professor at University of Vermont. He serves as the poetry editor of the Harvard Review. (www.majorjackson.com)